Went to Chicago, had a GREAT time. Best trip I’ve ever taken. Just me and my wife getting a chance to reconnect on our own. No schedules, no pressures.

Amazing.

Chicago remains my favourite American city. So much to do, awesome food. Second City mainstage was unbelievable. Saw the Tedeschi Trucks band at the Chicago Theater, really cool. It’s basically a cooler Toronto.

More importantly…relaxed for a minute. Haven’t done that in a long time.

But now we’re back! Stress away!!!

Long story short, it did not work out with my old professional association. In a way that bugged me, actually. I don’t mind that they didn’t want to explore paying for the product, in the end - it would have been useful and loved by a large proportion of the membership, but after all it’s always a judgment call with tech products, and sales is sales.

What really bothered me is how rude they were to me about it. I can’t stand unnecessary rudeness in general, but here I thought it was really uncalled for.

Ah well. That, too, falls under the ‘sales is sales’ category, unfortunately. Nothing to dwell on.

Will have to decide now what to do with the app. It’s a shame - first deployed app I’ve ever created, and not only could it help a whole lot of my colleagues, but it’s currently helping a bunch of other professionals and non-profits on a daily basis. But sometimes you have to kill your darlings to focus on making real progress. The experience has taught me a whole lot about why helpful technology that should exist, doesn’t exit. Boy, the conversation I could have with the me of a few years ago.

Anyways, onward!

Taking a break from lawbrarian to build my wife another product she’s asked for. She reads a lot of transcripts as a civil litigator, and wants a tool that will extract and organize all of the passages she highlights in transcripts.

Was easy to get up and running using the Google Cloud Vision API, but that was slow and expensive.

Instead, finally took the opportunity to sit down and learn the basics of OpenCV, which is pretty cool. Stuck it in a basic Flask app, and she is suitably impressed with a few days work. Continuing on with the theme of building things real people have actually asked me to build, I’m going to focus on this for a minute. If she needs it, and likes it, there will be others like her (or so the prevailing wisdom goes).

On an interesting sidenote, production grade open-source OCR that doesn’t run on a GPU is a never-ending problem, but to be honest I had never really tried anything other than pytesseract seriously. Amazingly, even though tesserocr is essentially a different lid on the same Tesseract engine, it works way faster and is way more accurate. Who’d of thunk?

On another interesting sidenote, I do contract legal research for other criminal lawyers, and I continue to be one of the few who genuinely enjoys it. You also see very quickly and often how intellectually dishonest counsel and judges can be. FOR EXAMPLE - the supreme court in Evans made clear A LONG TIME AGO that police cannot come and knock on your door to talk with you if they’ve already decided, or have realized they probably will, use the interaction to gather evidence against you. Lower court judges have not liked that, because so much of their dockets are impaireds and so many impaireds involve tracking down a person at their house based on the registered address associated with their vehicle after a complaint called into police.

So they’ve ‘policy-ed it away’ on a variety of occasions, with varying levels of intellectual dishonesty. One of the one that comes up alot is using a court of appeal case called Lotozky, in which the court makes a broad policy statement that police should be able to come onto the property of impaired drivers they are investigating, because it would be bad policy for impaired drivers to rush home in order to be ‘home free’ from investigation. Sure, if I was a judge who wanted to nail the impaired driving schmuck in my court, I’d rely on that too.

EXCEPT.

In that same case, the court makes pretty clear that their comments apply to the DRIVEWAY, and that they still think walking up and knocking on the door is TOO FAR.

Somehow all the judges and crowns seem to have conveniently forgot about that part, eh?

That’s law, unfortunately. A whole lot of convenient forgetting and intellectual dishonesty.

It is, however, a fun game to play.

Back to the grind.